SKY WILL NOT SEEK REBATE IF HUNDRED PUT ON ICE

BROADCASTER Sky Sports have given their blessing to the ECB postponing The Hundred for 12 months — despite the new competition’s importance to their £1.1billion television deal. Sky executives have told the ECB that they would rather delay the launch of the new format than broadcast a pale imitation this summer without crowds and overseas stars. The ECB will not make a final decision on The Hundred until next month but are coming to the view it will be postponed. The support of Sky Sports is likely to harden that thinking with the governing body, heartened that the broadcaster are not planning to demand a rebate on TV rights fees paid given the lack of live cricket. In a further indication of ECB thinking, it is understood that staff working on the new competition are among those at Lord’s who have been furloughed. Sky Sports’ launch of their roster of Hundred commentators and pundits, which was scheduled for tomorrow, has also been cancelled. There are several other factors which are leading the ECB to conclude that The Hundred — scheduled to start in mid-July — should be postponed for this summer. Given its aim is to attract a new audience to cricket, the ECB have assigned a huge marketing budget to a competition which has annual running costs of £40million. That spending will be hard to justify when the majority of players and administrative staff are taking pay cuts or facing job losses. There are also serious doubts over the availability of the three overseas players who have signed for each of the eight franchises, due to uncertainty over the resumption of international travel. The situation is complicated further by a potential clash with a rescheduled Indian Premier League or Caribbean Player League. As a result, ECB chief executive Tom Harrison (left) said last week that the priority would be pleasing cricket’s ‘core audience’. This is likely to mean the focus will be on internationals, the Twenty20 Blast and some red-ball county cricket in a shortened season. Yorkshire yesterday became the first county to furlough their players and coaches in response to the crisis. The majority of club staff had already been put on the Government’s coronavirus job retention scheme last month. FORMER England and Glamorgan all-rounder Peter Walker has died at 84. Walker played three Tests for England and spent his entire first-class career with Glamorgan, scoring more than 17,000 runs and taking 834 wickets.